Essential Nature Of The Scale

The Binet scale is made up of an extended series of tests in the nature of

"stunts," or problems, success in which demands the exercise of intelligence. As

left by Binet, the scale consists of 54 tests, so graded in difficulty that the easiest

lie well within the range of normal 3-year-old children, while the hardest tax

the intelligence of the average adult. The problems are designed

primarily to test native intelligence, not s hool knowledge or home

training. They try to answer the question "How intelligent is this

child?" How much the child has learned is of significance only in so far

as it throws light on his ability to learn more.



Binet fully appreciated the fact that intelligence is not homogeneous,

that it has many aspects, and that no one kind of test will display it

adequately. He therefore assembled for his intelligence scale tests of

many different types, some of them designed to display differences of

memory, others differences in power to reason, ability to compare, power

of comprehension, time orientation, facility in the use of number

concepts, power to combine ideas into a meaningful whole, the maturity

of apperception, wealth of ideas, knowledge of common objects, etc.